Vulgar words in A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music (Page 1)
This book at a glance
|
~ ~ ~ Sentence 235 ~ ~ ~
Has he not been making love violently to her for a space, sending Don Basilio to give her singing lessons and to urge her to accept his suit?
~ ~ ~ Sentence 427 ~ ~ ~
The Count makes love to his wife, thinking she is Susanna, promises her a dowry, and places a ring on her finger.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 431 ~ ~ ~
He makes love to her with extravagant pathos until interrupted by a slap in the face.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 488 ~ ~ ~
The trials of silence, secrecy, and hardihood in passing through the dread elements of fire and water were ancient literary materials; they may be found in the account of the initiation of a neophyte into the mysteries of Isis in Apuleius's "Metamorphoses; or, The Golden Ass," a romance written in the second century.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 836 ~ ~ ~
Here the opera ends for us; but originally, after the catastrophe the persons of the play, all but the reprobate whom divine justice has visited, returned to the scene to hear a description of the awful happenings he had witnessed from the buffoon who had hidden under the table, to dispose their plans for the future (for Ottavio and Anna, marriage in a year; for Masetto and Zerlina, a wedding instanter; for Elvira, a nunnery), and platitudinously to moralize that, the perfidious wretch having been carried to the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, naught remained to do save to sing the old song, "Thus do the wicked find their end, dying as they had lived."
~ ~ ~ Sentence 842 ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER V "FIDELIO" It was the scalawag Schikaneder who had put together the singular dramatic phantasmagoria known as Mozart's "Magic Flute," and acted the part of the buffoon in it, who, having donned the garb of respectability, commissioned Beethoven to compose the only opera which that supreme master gave to the world.